From the Dean's Desk

Research kudos

Martijn Cremers

Martijn Cremers

Monday, 22 April 2019
Welcome back from the joyous Easter holiday, where we celebrate the resurrection of Our Lord and His victory over sin and death. I hope you had a peaceful and relaxing weekend with your family and friends.
As we are in the home stretch for this academic year with commencement quickly upon us, I am glad to mention some recent faculty publications in well-regarded journals:
Timothy Loughran, C.R. Smith Professor of Finance; Bill McDonald, Thomas A. and James J. Bruder Professor of Administrative Leadership (along with Priyank Gandhi, assistant finance professor at Rutgers Business School who previously was at Mendoza) "Using Annual Report Sentiment as a Proxy for Financial Distress in U.S. Banks," (Journal of Behavioral Finance).
Current predictors of bank distress miss extreme events and lean heavily on one variable, capital adequacy. Professors Gandhi, Loughran and McDonald propose using sentiment measures derived from the text of banks’ annual reports as a proxy for bank distress. They find that negative sentiment is significantly associated with distress outcomes and suggest that regulators augment current early warning systems with a text-based measure.
Adam Wowak, Management & Organization associate professor "CEO political activism: A stakeholder alignment model," (accepted for publication at Academy of Management Review).
 
Conventional wisdom holds that CEOs should avoid wading into society’s debates. Yet more and more CEOs are ignoring this dictum, taking public stances on socially contentious issues. In this paper, Professor Wowak and his co-author introduce a theory of CEO sociopolitical activism that highlights its causes and consequences, particularly as they pertain to firm stakeholders.
F. Asís Martínez-Jerez, Accountancy associate professor “Contracting with Opportunistic Partners: Theory and Application to Technology Development and Innovation,” (Management Science).
Innovative strategic partnerships embrace ambiguity. Relying on detailed contracts creates the temptation to exploit loopholes. Instead, contracts that are ambiguous and renegotiable help ensure that both parties benefit from the strategic partnership, even when circumstances change, focusing on uncertainties and threats external to the partnership.
I congratulate the authors!
In Notre Dame,
Martijn

New minors

Martijn Cremers

Martijn Cremers

Monday, 15 April 2019
Mendoza will be launching three new minors for the 2019-2020 academic year, two of which are initially open only to non-business majors. These minors provide greater access to our undergraduate courses to non-business majors – consistent with our desire to serve all Notre Dame undergraduate students – and also reflect increasing collaboration across our campus. All of the minors have met with an enthusiastic response and strong enrollment.
The three new 15-credit-hour minors, open to students graduating in the class of 2021 and subsequent years, include:
  1. Accountancy: For non-business majors who desire a significant exposure to the language of business, the minor develops the accounting analytical skills to enhance careers in a wide variety of industries. Enrollment so far is 30 rising juniors and 15 rising sophomores.
  2. Digital Marketing: Offered to non-business majors, the minor presents fundamental marketing concepts as well as courses specific to digital marketing. Enrollment so far is above 80 students.
  3. Real Estate: Administered through Mendoza’s Finance Department in collaboration with Notre Dame’s Fitzgerald Institute for Real Estate, the minor is open to all Notre Dame undergraduate students (i.e., business and non-business majors), and includes courses from outside Mendoza as well. Forty-seven sophomores and 36 first-years are enrolled so far.
Finally, last August we opened the Innovation and Entrepreneurship minor to all Notre Dame undergraduate students, as a collaborative effort between Mendoza and the IDEA Center. Its current enrollment is more than 100 students.
Creating these minors has involved a significant amount of work on the part of many people, from the academic department chairs and assistant chairs to everyone in the Office of Undergraduate Studies, and of course our partners at the IDEA Center and the Fitzgerald Institute for Real Estate. I’m thankful to all for their contributions.
In Notre Dame,
Martijn

Kudos to Stayer

Martijn Cremers

Martijn Cremers

Monday, 8 April 2019
The Stayer Center for Executive Education’s non-degree programs have an especially important mission – to help business professionals to become better leaders, especially in the areas of values-based leadership, innovation, business acumen, and strategy and growth.
Here are a few numbers to show the level of activity in just the past year through eight open-enrollment programs, customized programs and six online learning certificates:
       1,262: Number of people participating in open enrollment and custom programming
       195: Number of training days in open enrollment and custom programming
       1,516: Number of enrollments for the six online certificate programs
       27: Number of unique clients in custom programming
       $4.1M: Revenue generated from non-degree programming
Stayer’s custom clients include Bayer, Thor Industries, Ernst & Young, Exelon, the National Council of State Housing Agencies, Tsinghua PBC School of Finance, Polaris and the Drucker Institute.  Several of these organizations have a 25+ year relationship with the Stayer Center for Executive Education.
Stayer keeps the mission of Notre Dame central to all that they do. A recent example of this is the Center's work with Cristo Rey Network, a group of 35 Catholic-based schools across the nation whose mission is to empower students from underserved, low-income communities to develop their minds and hearts to become lifelong contributors to society.
Stayer is acting as a co-designer of a professional development program for their senior leadership teams. In June of 2019, Stayer will launch the first cohort of 50 school leaders in a two-year program designed to develop their leadership and business acumen skills. The curriculum will include in-class sessions, action learning projects and a personal action plan. Many thanks to Sue Callaghan, Chris Adkins, Viva Bartkus and Walt Clements for their design, content expertise and participation.
I hope this gives you a better appreciation for the hard work and learner-focused environment that the team within the Stayer Center for Executive Education provides our non-degree participants and degree students. We can all be proud of the work they do.  
In Notre Dame,
Martijn

ND Voice

Martijn Cremers

Martijn Cremers

Monday, 1 April 2019
At last Friday’s University-wide Town Hall meeting, some results of the ND Voice survey (distributed in February) were presented. Your feedback about how well the University and Mendoza are performing in providing a workplace that contributes to your wellbeing is very important to me. I appreciate your candor and feedback about what is going well and where you think we can improve. We can’t get better without understanding where we have key areas of opportunity to do better.
Reviewing the results for Mendoza, here are a few items that stood out to me:
  • Our participation rate was 80.9%, which is an excellent number and speaks to the importance you placed on providing your input. Our highest scores are around Engagement and Work Community, where we have higher numbers than the overall University.
  • Respect and Fairness consistently earned a low score across the University, which is a concern and an opportunity to improve, and I commit to diving into the issue more deeply.
  • We also have room to improve in the category of Recognition, which is another area of opportunity across campus.
  • It would be good to better understand differences in scores between men and women, and explore how we can address these.
I am committed to working together with the associate deans, directors and managers across the College to both celebrate where we do well and to work on areas where we can improve. The timeline for the next steps is as follows:
May/June: Kara and I will be meeting individually with all directors and associate deans who received ND Voice reports specific to their departments to discuss the results, areas of strengths and opportunities, and next steps for action.
June 18: During our next Staff Town Hall, I will present Mendoza’s results in more detail.
Summer 2019: We will start executing action plans, involving all staff across the College.
Winter 2019: We will conduct pulse surveys across the College and schedule check-in meetings to measure our progress and determine additional follow-up.
Please know that you do not need to wait for the next ND Voice to raise questions or concerns, and I encourage you to talk to your manager, director, associate dean or myself. Thank you for your service to Mendoza!
In Notre Dame,
Martijn

Faculty research update

Martijn Cremers

Martijn Cremers

Monday, 11 March 2019

Here’s an update on several noteworthy published or forthcoming papers by our Mendoza faculty:

"Conforming Tax Avoidance and Capital Market Pressure" (forthcoming in The Accounting Review)

Brad Badertscher, Accountancy Professor

In this study, Brad and his co-authors developed a measure of corporate tax avoidance that reduces both financial and taxable income, which they refer to as "book-tax conforming" tax avoidance. The measure should be useful in future research and provides new insights on the extent to which public firms are willing to reduce income tax liabilities at the expense of reporting lower financial income.

"Institutional Logics and Pluralistic Responses to Enterprise System Implementation: A Qualitative Meta-
Analysis" (forthcoming in MIS Quarterly)

Nicholas Berente, ITAO Associate Professor

Researchers have been studying organizational reactions to enterprise information systems now for 20 years. Enterprise information systems span across diverse units in an organization, and include systems like enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and electronic health records (EHR). In this study, Nick and his co-authors use a "qualitative meta analysis" methodology to synthesize the findings from the existing body of research. They developed an integrative framework that describes when to expect what sort of reaction to an enterprise information system implementation in different parts of an organization and under different conditions.

"Transparency and dealer networks: Evidence from the initiation of post-trade reporting in the mortgage 
backed security market" (Journal of Financial Economics)


Paul Schultz, John W. and Maude Clarke Professor of Finance

Mortgage-backed securities, like corporate, municipal and treasury bonds, trade in dealer markets. Investors buy and sell them through investment banks and other financial intermediaries rather than in a centralized exchange. In dealer markets it is often difficult for investors to determine whether they are paying or receiving a fair price for securities. Schultz and his co-author examined the impact of a regulatory change that forced dealers to report trades and trade prices within 45 minutes. The research found in part that with trade reporting, trading costs fell for institutional investors and that concealing trade prices didn’t help investors but rather protected inefficient high-cost dealers.

"What Are We Explaining? A Review and Agenda on Initiating, Engaging, Performing, and Contextualizing 
Entrepreneurship" (Journal of Management)


Dean Shepherd, Ray and Milann Siegfried Professor of Entrepreneurship, Management & Organization

Entrepreneurship is multifaceted. The purpose of this review is to acknowledge and critically assess the
many and varied dependent variables (DVs) of entrepreneurship over the last 17 years. By focusing
exclusively on systematically reviewing entrepreneurship’s DVs, this paper maps out, classifies and
provides order to the phenomena that scholars consider part of this self-defined field of research. Using a
systematic selection process and an inductive approach to categorization, the authors offer a metaframework
for organizing entrepreneurship’s DVs.

"Emotion and consumption: Toward a new understanding of cultural collisions between Hong Kong and
PRC luxury consumers" (Journal of Consumer Culture)

John Sherry Jr., Raymond W. & Kenneth G. Herrick Professor of Marketing

This study examines how specific emotions drive consumption, as embodied by escalating conflicts
between luxury consumers in Hong Kong and the People's Republic of China. Emotions engender colliding
notions of self, status and cultural and political identity between these disparate yet intertwined cultures.

I congratulate the authors and I’m grateful for their dedication to research and academic excellence.

In Notre Dame,

Martijn

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